


Red, Seven, Jester

by sparxwrites



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: (Ish) - Freeform, Blackouts, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Past Brainwashing, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-31 23:23:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20248360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: “TheREDones are my favourite,” says Yasha, in melodic, fluent Celestial, as she turns a page in her book to show Caleb a pressed sprig of flowers. They’re almost unbearably delicate, pea-sized flowers flattened into fascinatingly textured and perfect circles, a small cascade of them spattered around the centre stem like a jagged spray of arterial blood. “They’re just… so small. But so vivid, you know?”A conversation with Yasha in Celestial triggers something long-buried in the back of Caleb's mind.





	Red, Seven, Jester

**Author's Note:**

> For an anonymous ask I got on my fic blog:
> 
> "Prompt: Caleb still has Winter Soldier-style triggers buried in his head"

“The _**RED**_ ones are my favourite,” says Yasha, in melodic, fluent Celestial, as she turns a page in her book to show Caleb a pressed sprig of flowers. They’re almost unbearably delicate, pea-sized flowers flattened into fascinatingly textured and perfect circles, a small cascade of them spattered around the centre stem like a jagged spray of arterial blood. “They’re just… so _small_. But so vivid, you know?”

Talking in Celestial whilst on watch is a habit they’ve picked up, since they’re the only two in the group that know it, and there’s precious little occasion for conversation in it elsewhere. Though he has an accent where Yasha does not, Caleb’s comprehension is faultless, and he’s used to interpreting the resonant, ringing tones of the language with ease.

The sudden pressure the words raise in the back of his skull, like the tolling of a bell, the heavy gathering of a mist in the pre-dawn cool, is new. “Ja,” he agrees, faintly, through the _red red red _ringing at the nape of his neck. “They are beautiful.”

He prefers the blue ones she showed him, two pages back, broad blooms with delicate petals threaded through with purple, if he’s being honest.

Distracted with trying to ascertain why he’s suddenly feeling so strange, the next word he catches hits him like a clip to the jaw. “-only _**SEVEN**_ pages left in this book, and then… I don’t know. I’ll have to buy a new one,” Yasha says, and he’s reeling, the bell tolling louder, the vibrations making his back teeth ache. It’s like a sudden-onset migraine, and he makes a muffled noise, jamming the heel of one palm into his eye socket against the sudden pressure in his eyeballs.

“Caleb?” Yasha asks, her mismatched eyes caught on the creases of pain that suddenly line his face. “Is everything okay?”

He winces, grits his teeth, praying for the ringing to fade as he grinds his hand more firmly against his eye. “I am just- it is just a headache,” he says, and his voice sounds distant to his own ears. “It will pass.”

Yasha catches her lower lip between her teeth, releases it. When she speaks, he barely hears her over the bell-tone, now deep and pulsing, like a drum turned melodic. “Are you sure? You don’t look good. …I could get _**JESTER**_?”

The ringing, this time, turns the world into bright, bleach-bone white.

He comes back to himself trembling, not from fear, but from the hot blood-pulse of adrenaline in his veins. He’d be more than trembling, if it weren’t for Jester sprawled across his back and pinning his arms down, Beau sat on his legs with her thumb jammed into a point on his spine that’s making all his joints feel unpleasantly numb. There’s a whining, thin and feral and _hungry_, a panting - it takes a moment for him to realise it’s _him._

It takes a full minute for him to stop it.

“-just talking,” Yasha’s saying, when he comes back enough to hear again. Her voice is soft, as always, and with an edge of helplessness that makes him _ache_, somewhere a mile below the buzzing-pulsing-burning vibrating through his skull. “We were just talking, and then he… he just stood up, and his hands lit up, and he…”

He what? Bren doesn’t remember, but Caleb can smell the hot ozone of fire and scorched grass, the faintest hint of seared meat underneath. His fingers ache, cracked through black-hot like they always are when he raise an inferno. He can take an educated guess what he did.

“Caleb?” says Jester, tentatively. “Caleb, are you- Beau, have you got him?” Beau must nod, because the weight lifts from his upper body a second later, though not the numbness. “Are you back with us? What happened?”

“I… don’t know,” he breathes, when he remembers how his lungs work, an exhale on the edge of a moan. His mouth tastes of blood and desert, and there’s something tacky drying stiff below his nose, his ears. “Ich- I was-” He’s no stranger to madness, the kind that leaves you hollow and blank and swallowing time down in long, white stretches of absence, but _this_\- this is something else. Something swift, violent, like a knife through the skull. His hands are still shaking. “It just, it happened, it-”

The fingers on his spine shift, ease off, and his arms sharpen into clarity. He brings his hands to his mouth, presses them over tear-wet cheeks. The smell of seared meat grows stronger, and then eases with a wash of pastry-sweet healing magic from Jester’s careful touch. Small, green hands touch his face, his hair, and he becomes aware of Nott’s soft crooning next to his ear. Whatever she’s humming, he doesn’t recognise it, but it has the cadence of a lullaby.

His heart slows, the racing eases. The tight bands of panic around his chest loosen.

“There were- words,” he says, when he can breathe, when each inhale isn’t a desperate, sobbing gulp. His face is still buried in his hands, but he can tell who cast _Calm Emotions_ on him- the magic tastes of peat-bog and fresh pine needles on the back of his tongue, feels like the slow bending of a tree in the wind. “That you said, in Celestial, when we talked. They- _rang_.” He licks his lips, tastes sour blood and fear-sweat. “What… what happened after?”

He’s not sure he wants to know.

“You went goddamn crazy,” says Fjord, bluntly. Not hisses at him for it, an indignant, muted screech, but Caleb is grateful for his honesty. “When we woke up, your hands were on fire, the grass was on fire, half our _shit_ was on fire, and if Yasha hadn’t had her sword-”

“You went for her _face_! With your _hands_!” blurts Jester, just as Yasha says, “I’m fine, though.”

“I healed her right up,” rumbles Caduceus, pleasantly, as though the bottom hasn’t just dropped out of Caleb’s stomach, as though he hasn’t just plummeted into spiralling freefall. “Just a little bit of scorching, really, nothing- oh, none of that, now. Come on.”

A soft-furred hand cups the back of his neck, and the peat-pine-steady-bend of verdant magic washes over him once more. The impending flashback subsides unsteadily to the back of his brain. He still hears the screams, but they’re distant, muted. It hurts worst, almost, like this - as though he’s forgotten them.

“I didn’t- that wasn’t-” he breathes, but the weight of the magic and the easing of the trembling make him aware, abruptly, of how _exhausted_ he is. It feels like someone’s taken a mallet to his brain, tenderised it to bruised pulp inside his skull. Nott’s still petting his hair, humming scratchily, and it’s making his eyelids droop despite the restrained panic still thrashing somewhere tucked away. “I don’t know-”

The hand on the back his neck shifts a little, a thumb pressed against the point where spine meets skull. “Shh, enough of that. _Sleep_, Mister Caleb. We’ll worry about this in the morning.”

“What did you-!” demands Nott, close to his ear, but his eyelids are already sliding closed at the command. The last thing he sees, before sleep takes him fully, is an image, imprinted on the inside of his eyelids- Yasha’s face, wide-eyed and pale, with his fast-approaching fire reflected in her mismatched eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> come find me @sparxwrites on tumblr for more content!


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